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Microsoft and Getty Settle Photo Dispute

If you are one who looks at images on the web, you will certainly know the name Getty. Their set of images are all over the web, and their licenses cover some of the biggest photos on the web today. Microsoft and Getty have been in an online dispute lately, but was settled on Wednesday to make all parties happy.

The online dispute was all about copyright infringement, and has been going on since September of 2014. The battles between Getty and Microsoft’s Bing unit have been somewhat public, and were filing suits against each other for a long war ahead. But, this settlement makes things go a lot easier.

Getty and Bing?

Getty had sued Microsoft’s Bing for massive copyright infringement, and last September waged massive war against them in the courts. Getty said that Bing was using its photos in their online photo tools, Bing Image Widgets, and illegally showed over 80 million images that Getty owns the copyright to now.

This new agreement now calms the waters between the two companies, and the new business partnership means that the two companies can work together in the future. The dismissal of claims against each other means that the two companies can now build applications that will use each other’s technologies together.

Bing and Images

Bing had removed the Image widget from its site right after the Getty lawsuit was filed, but Microsoft’s firm position of a possible relaunch of the widget caused the lawsuite to continue. Bing scours the web for images, both royalty free and with copyright. Companies know this, and are careful in what Bing can and cannot see.

Getty with over 80 million images is one of the web’s largest image sources, and sells its images and licenses to magazines, TV channels, and online companies. Getty saw Bing as stealing their images, and probably did. Now, some money and business sharing means these two giants can move ahead and make better products.

Getty and Microsoft had been enemies up until this week. Now, they can share income and business deals with this new agreement.

Written by:Dave Amodt Dave is our news reporter, he reports on everything Microsoft, including MSFT (stock news), related Windows news as well as most hardware news.Dave runs his own content production company and publishes new content every weekday on our site. If you want to stay up to date on everything Microsoft, make sure to subscribe to Dave. He's also on Google+